


Get it wrong, get it right

by HelveticaBrown



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13000128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelveticaBrown/pseuds/HelveticaBrown
Summary: Henry's all grown up and leaving for college and Emma and Regina are having feelings about it all.Can be read as an X years later for Teaching Miss Mills or as a standalone piece.





	Get it wrong, get it right

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of folks on tumblr (I think it might have been witchpieceoftoast and evergrove) asked for an X years later oneshot for Teaching Miss Mills like a year ago and I kind of half wrote it, decided I hated it and put it aside. I'm still not convinced about it, because it was really hard to try and get my head back into that universe, but I was going through some old partly written stuff and decided to finish it anyway long after anyone's likely to care.
> 
> If you don't think it really fits, or you haven't read TMM, I think it (mostly) works as a standalone. Anyway, hope a few of you enjoy it.

* * *

 It’s a stupid fight. It starts when she teases Regina about ironing Henry’s socks and she’s not sure how it spirals from there, but it does. She knows why Regina bites back, understands the emotion that sits behind it, understands the uncertainty in the face of so much upheaval. She knows why, because she’s feeling it too, even though it’s not quite the same for her. She wasn’t there for Henry’s first words or first steps, his first scraped knee, his first violin recital, but she’s been there for more than a few milestones and it’s hard enough for her to accept that Henry’s next ones will be out in the world, away from them both.

She and Regina don’t fight much, but the first time they’d fought – really fought – Emma had jumped in her car and driven all the way to Boston. She’d ended up crashing on Mulan and Marian’s couch for the night and spent the whole time wondering if there would be anything to come back to. She’d stayed there, miserable and bereft, until Mulan had eventually lost patience with her, stolen her phone and called Regina.

These days, if she runs it’s only as far as the spare bedroom and she’ll lie there tossing and turning until Regina tiptoes in and slips beneath the covers. They’re better at talking now, but sometimes old habits die hard. The flipside of loving is knowing, and Regina knows her far too well. Knows every weak spot and just how to probe it to extract as much pain as possible. And she’s the same. It’s a heavy responsibility to hold someone’s heart in your hand and even though they both try their hardest to be kind and gentle, even the best person slips up a little sometimes. With all the baggage they both carry, maybe it’s a miracle they don’t slip more often.

Little hurts and old insecurities are never too far away. Regina and Henry have always done their best to make her feel like she’s part of a family, but sometimes she can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s not enough. After all, she never was before. It’s been five years, but she thinks even with fifty on the clock that voice would still be there whispering in her ear on nights like this. And even though she knows there was no real venom behind Regina’s words, as always, she can’t help but wonder if this will be the night they don’t find a way back to each other.

She tries to find a comfortable position, shifts fitfully for a while, but she knows she won’t until she can feel Regina’s skin against her own again.

It would be easy to keep stewing over things, picking Regina’s words apart until she’s explored every possible hidden meaning. But sometimes _being_ right is less important than _doing_ right, so she gets up and tiptoes down the hall to their bedroom. She feels Regina stiffen when she lies down behind her and puts a tentative hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Regina turns over to face her, her mouth twisted into something that’s not quite a smile. “I think that’s supposed to be my line. I shouldn’t have said those things. They weren’t fair and they weren’t true.”

“I get it, you know. I just wish you’d talk to me.”

There’s silence for a moment, and then, “Mother called this morning.”

It’s not really the answer she was expecting, but it explains a lot. Sometimes she wonders why Regina keeps giving Cora chances after everything she’s done. It’s true that Cora hasn’t engaged in the type of direct interference she’d favoured in the past, but she’s still capable of wreaking a more subtle kind of havoc with nothing more than words.

“What did she say?”

“The usual.” There’s a bitter laugh and Emma hates that Cora has the power to leave Regina this raw and bruised.

“She started by telling me about the latest chinless wonder she thinks I should marry, then moved on to questioning my life choices and finished up by criticising my parenting decisions. Among other things, she’s still unhappy that I let Henry choose his own school when she’d pulled some strings to get him a spot at Yale.”

“You know your mother’s full of crap, right?”

The sigh she receives in response speaks volumes.

“Well she is,” Emma says, and her voice is fierce, as though she could ward off all the unkindness in the world with the power of words alone. She knows that words aren’t always enough, so she shifts closer to lend whatever warmth and strength she can.

She smooths Regina’s hair back and runs gentle fingers down the line of her jaw, trying to soothe the tension evident in the tightly-clenched muscles beneath her fingertips. “Is there anything I can do to take your mind off things?”

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood,” Regina says, but she kisses Emma anyway.

It’s not really what Emma had been asking, but as Regina deepens the kiss and she feels herself respond, she thinks maybe it’s what both of them need right now. Her hands and her mouth traverse familiar paths mapped out over hundreds of nights of exploration; she knows all of Regina’s ways and when to take them and whether she should move fast or slow. And when Regina finally shudders beneath her, fingers almost vise-like in her hair, it’s an affirmation, a reminder that no matter how far adrift they might feel, they both have something to hold onto, something tangible, something real.

“It’s going to be so quiet,” Regina says, afterwards, as they lie there in the dark.

“I know what you mean.”

It _will_ be quiet. Henry’s a teenage boy and even in a house this big, he still takes up a lot of space. He’s mature and considerate, but like all teenage boys, he has a voice that’s always just a little too loud and the house is a haphazard shrine to his enthusiasms, both fleeting and enduring.

“If it’ll make you feel better, I can start leaving my running shoes in the hallway and stomping around like I’ve got lead weights on my ankles,” Emma says.

“You _already_ do that, Emma.” She can almost hear the eye roll in Regina’s voice. It’s not unkind, though, and she presses a kiss to Emma’s neck a moment later. She follows it up with a soft, “I love you, you know?” and Emma pulls her closer, kisses her and responds in kind.

There’s still a lingering tension evident in Regina’s form and late though it is, she shows no signs of falling asleep.

Even though she knows why, knows there’s nothing she can do to fix that, Emma tries anyway. “You know he’s gonna be fine, right? Better than fine, even.”

“You think I’m being silly?” Regina says, her voice sharp.

Emma chuckles. “I think you’re being his mom, and that’s never going to change.”

“I worry. I just don’t know how not to worry about him.”

“I know you do.” She knows, because somehow Regina and Henry have found enough room in their lives for her, and as much as she plays it cool, she feels it too. She pushes that aside, though, because it’s not what Regina needs to hear right now. “He’s an exceptional kid, with an exceptional mother and he won’t be able to help but take the world by storm.”

Eventually, she feels Regina relax a little and then she can too. Neither of them sleep particularly well, but any sleep at all is probably a better than expected outcome.

*****

They load up the car in the morning and Emma suggests Henry drive the first leg. Regina looks like she wants to argue, but Henry’s grinning gleefully and Regina’s never been good at saying no to him. Regina does, however, cling white-knuckled to the Jesus handle for the next five miles until Emma unclips her seatbelt and leans forward.

“Relax, he’s got this,” she whispers close to Regina’s ear and lays a calming hand on her shoulder. She keeps it there until she sees the pink return to Regina’s fingertips and then a few moments longer.

Emma had ended up being the one who taught him to drive (not in the Bug – Regina and Henry had both looked at her like she was insane when she’d suggested it). Regina had taken Henry out twice and both times she’d come home and poured herself a drink with shaking hands, while Henry complained she hadn’t let him go above twenty.

 _“I keep remembering him sitting behind the wheel of Graham’s truck when he was too small to even see over the dashboard and as much as I try, I can’t see him any other way,”_ she’d confided to Emma after one of those lessons and Emma had realised that if it was left to Regina, Henry wouldn’t have his license until he was thirty. And it hadn’t been a hardship to take up the baton to make sure Henry was the proud owner of a shitty DMV photo before his seventeenth birthday; she’d liked spending time with him when he was a precocious eleven-year-old and she liked the young man he’d grown into over the years since.

They finally make it to Henry’s accommodation safe and sound (although a little behind schedule with Regina constantly monitoring the speedometer) and Emma and Henry struggle up the stairs under the weight of all the things Regina had insisted he pack. (Emma’s pretty sure he’ll be smuggling a lot of it home at the first possible opportunity).

Regina fusses with Henry’s bed, making sure it’s perfectly made, hospital corners and everything. Emma smiles to herself, because she’s pretty sure it’ll be the first and last time the bed sees anything other than a screwed up pile of covers. She steps out into the hall to compose herself, because Regina would probably kill her just a little bit if she caught her laughing. Henry follows her a moment later, leaning against the wall beside her.

She nudges him with her elbow. “Make sure you call your mother. _Often_. You know it’s not so far away that I can’t come and kick your butt if you don’t.” She pauses for emphasis, and then, “And don’t forget I went to school with your new coach. One phone call from me and you’ll be doing hill sessions for days.”

He turns towards her, rolling his eyes dramatically, every inch his mother’s son. “Of course I will.” And she knows that he’s telling the truth, knows that her threats are nothing more than theatre.

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you Ma?”

There’s still a jolt of surprise (not at all unpleasant) when she hears him call her that. It had first happened last Christmas when Henry, a little tipsy after a couple of pilfered glasses of his mother’s apple cider, had begged her not to rat him out. His slurred ‘Emma’ had come out more as ‘Ma’ and she’d been so distracted by his slip-up that she’d agreed to his request without any argument.

She’d watched Regina carefully the first time he’d said it in front of her, not sure what reaction to expect, worried it might be seen as an incursion into her relationship with Henry. And there’d been an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrows–so small, so brief that even Emma who had studied the minutiae of Regina’s facial expressions had struggled to see it–but the smile that followed had been soft, genuine, glad.

“You know I will,” she says.

He smiles crookedly at her and says, “I might just have to come check up on you and make sure,” and she sincerely hopes he makes good on that threat.

When they go back into Henry’s room, Regina has triumphed over the recalcitrant bed linen and is now arranging Henry’s clothes in his wardrobe with regimented precision. Emma rolls her eyes when she sees the three-piece suit in the tiny hanging space, because if Regina has her way, Henry’s going to be the most overdressed student on campus. She doesn’t let either of them see her reaction, though, and when Henry looks over to her in search of an ally, she just gives him her best shit-eating grin, before she realises that with Henry living hundreds of miles away, Regina might just start stress-ironing her socks instead.

There’s a knock at the door that turns out to be Henry’s new room-mate, and Emma can see Regina’s reluctant acceptance that the time to leave Henry to it is fast approaching. She leans against the doorframe and watches as Regina fusses with Henry’s hair and an invisible speck of lint on his shirt, before Henry draws her in for a hug. She still remembers a time when that hug would have been a hard-won prize and she knows it’s never far from Regina’s mind either.

And Emma would be lying if she said she wasn’t the slightest bit misty-eyed at the sight of them. She hangs back, watching them until Regina and Henry both look her way and then they’re waving her over and pulling her into a hug she never wants to end. It has to, though, far too soon, and she feels the stretch and snap of bonds drawing taut across a distance. This family she’d never expected to find is not quite fragmenting, but it won’t ever be the same and she realises she’s less ready for this than she’d expected. She’s proud–beyond proud–of Henry and the young man he’s grown into, but the knowledge that the rest of his growing will be done at a distance is bittersweet.

She buries her face in Henry’s shoulder for a moment longer, knows that Regina is doing the same against his other shoulder, until she can pretend to possess some semblance of calm. She wills the tears she can feel forming not to fall, because one of them needs to be able to see well enough to start the drive home. Opposite her, Regina’s given up any attempt to fight the inevitability of gravity.

“Love you, Mom,” Henry says, and Emma summons a Kleenex she’d reserved for this very moment and hands it wordlessly to Regina. She needs one of her own seconds later, when Henry follows it up with a soft, “Love you, Ma.”

On the way out of the dorms, they walk past a guy wearing a t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it and Regina looks set to march back to Henry’s room. Emma laces her fingers through Regina’s, not quite dragging her away, but definitely manoeuvring her (mostly) gently back to the parking lot.

“Relax,” Emma says, soothingly, even though she’s barely keeping it together herself.

“I _can’t_.”

“Well, you know, _he_ might be able to hook us up with something that could help.” She gestures after marijuana-shirt guy’s fast-receding figure.

Regina’s fingers tighten around her own, and now she’s the one being towed towards the car. “We’re leaving before you get any ideas about regressing to your no-doubt misspent youth.”

Emma grins, because any brief distraction feels like an enormous victory. “Serious athlete, remember? One too many slices of pizza was about as misspent as my college years got.”

“Fair point.” There’s a pause, as Emma unlocks the car, and then, “And I guess I was the one who dropped out of college to raise a baby, so I suppose by some measures…” Regina trails off and chokes out a feeble laugh.

It’s not even particularly funny, but Emma laughs too, because it’s a glimmer of hope, a sign that they’ll be okay.

She slips into the driver’s seat and has to spend a minute adjusting the mirrors and the seat, because Henry’s grown so damn tall that she can barely reach the pedals. Beside her, Regina’s fumbling with her seatbelt, a task that would normally be well within her means. Emma reaches over and takes her hand again, steadies it with her own.

Regina looks over at her. “Am I being ridiculous?”

Emma shakes her head. “If you’re being ridiculous, so am I.”

Regina offers her a watery smile. “As long as we’re being ridiculous together.”

And they are. They sit for a moment longer, quiet, fingers still interlaced, allowing themselves to just _be_ , before Emma finally turns the key in the ignition and starts the long drive to a home that won't ever be quite the same. 


End file.
